Shaun Philip Mason (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
adaptiveimmunities) wrote2016-09-30 03:38 pm
adaptiveimmunities) wrote2016-09-30 03:38 pm
Entry tags:
Shaun EWay App
Name: Zoe
DW username:nutterzoi
E-Mail: nutterzoi@hotmail.com
IM: W1ndrBoy003
Plurk:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
nutterzoi
Other Characters: N/A
Character Name: Shaun Mason
Series: Newsflesh
Timeline: Shortly after the beginning of Deadline, before the Oakland outbreak.
Canon Resource Link: No wiki, alas. Series on author’s website
Character History: The end of the world came and went in the summer of 2014, when the cure for cancer met the cure for the common cold, and spawned a zombie uprising. The dead rose, attacked the living, and at least forty percent of the world’s population was killed. The survivors moved on, and learned to cope with the Kellis-Amberlee virus that now infected the whole world, and the zombies that rose when people died and the virus activated. The world changed.
And all that happened before Shaun was even born. Rude, right?
Shaun was one of the orphans of the uprising, adopted as an infant as one half of a boy/girl set by a journalist couple, who were trying to create the Perfect Family™ after the death of their son Philip in a zombie dog attack. The Masons were pioneer bloggers in the new age of journalism, and they used their family ruthlessly to keep their ratings up. Shaun caught onto this much more quickly than Georgia--one of the few times in their lives that he was quicker on the uptake than she was. They weren’t a family. They were a business.
Despite the lack of parental warmth, there were definite benefits to the arrangement. The Masons were adamant about raising Shaun and Georgia the way they wanted to--which meant as much freedom and fresh air as possible, in a world circumscribed by blood tests and hazard zones. They wanted them to be unafraid of the outside world the way most of the population was. They succeeded. And when Georgia decided she was going to become a blogger, well. Shaun wasn’t going to be left behind. They’d always been inseparable, and that wasn’t going to change. George became a “newsie” (just the facts, ma’am), while Shaun became an “Irwin,” meaning he found dead things to poke with sticks for the amusement of the public at large.
The most important thing they got from their parents, though, was each other. They had been inseparable from the moment they were adopted, sharing a room until they were teenagers, and then sleeping in adjoining rooms afterward. As far as Shaun was concerned, Georgia was the only family he wanted or needed, and he didn’t feel the need to explain that to anyone who might think it was weird that his sister was still his best friend. Nor did he feel the need to explain the physical aspect of their relationship to anyone (not that it was an issue. They kept things quiet to avoid scandal and disownment). Still, as far as Shaun was concerned, it was their life, and they had the blood tests to prove they weren’t biologically related, so the rest of the world could go to hell. Georgia was the only person he loved in any meaningful way, and he would follow her to the end of the world.
Then they got the biggest break of their young blogging careers. They were selected, along with their friend and colleague (and technical and espionage expert) Buffy, to be the blogging team for presidential hopeful Senator Ryman. And just like that, they had their own domain, their own market share, and they were on the campaign trail. It was sink or swim--no going back now.
For a while things went smoothly. The senator was almost too good to be true--a man of honesty and principles, which George appreciated, and the security team was friendly and not averse to letting journalists look under rocks for dead things, which Shaun appreciated. Senator Ryman’s popularity continued to grow, along with that of the newly minted “After the End Times.”
Then came Eakly, Oklahoma.
An outbreak of zombies attacked the camp they’d set up for the night after one of Senator Ryman’s speeches. Shaun and George helped to put down the outbreak (catching it all on film, of course), but not everyone survived. They lost staffers and security alike. It wasn’t until later that they discovered that the attack had been the result of deliberate sabotage. Some of the alarms had been cut, and some of the security guards had been shot. They never had a chance, and Shaun would have nightmares about it for weeks.
Still, the show (and the campaign) must go on, and they weren’t going to let a little thing like a failed assassination attempt slow them down. In fact, the footage from the attack actually made their ratings go up. Everyone loves a little drama with their news. Similarly, Senator Ryman’s popularity continued to increase, making him one of the top contenders for the party nomination as the RNC approached.
At which point tragedy struck again. Ryman took the nomination, over second place candidate Governor Tate (the dangerously fundamentalist candidate from Texas), while an outbreak was happening on his horse ranch back home. His wife’s parents, several stablehands, and his oldest daughter lost their lives while he was accepting his party’s nomination.
While most people wrote off the incident as a tragic accident, George thought there was something more there. She and Shaun went to investigate the site, bringing along Rick, one of their newer hires, to help out, and stepped on the answer. Literally. While Shaun was pulling broken pieces of syringe out of the bottom of his boot, they discovered another intact syringe, filled with live-state virus. It wasn’t an accident. Someone had deliberately infected one of the horses with active Kellis-Amberlee virus in order to set off an outbreak. It was murder.
After a slightly harrowing encounter with the military while they tried to leave the site, in which Shaun was belligerent toward the men with the big guns who were threatening his sister, they returned to their hotel. There, Ryman and his new running mate, Governor Tate, tried to convince them to stop following the campaign and go home. It was too dangerous. People were dying. Shaun and Georgia disagreed (Shaun somewhat more loudly and with more profanity, but he’s never minded looking unprofessional so that George can look better by comparison). They had signed on to follow the entire campaign, and they were going to follow it to the end, no matter what. While Buffy wanted to take the out they were being offered, she was overruled. They continued, hurtling toward the next tragedy.
It struck when the finally hit the road again, and this time, it was far more personal. They were attacked on the road to Texas, and Buffy was bitten, giving her plenty of time to deliver some devastating news. She had turned traitor. She’d been feeding information about the campaign to someone who wanted to do them harm. She’d thought she was doing the right thing to save the world, until the incident at the Ryman ranch, at which point she’d realized that her actions were getting people killed, and stopped the flow of information. Which of course, only made her a liability that had needed to be disposed of. She gave them her passwords before she finished converting, and Georgia fired the shot that kept her from rising again.
And the hits kept on coming. It turned out that someone had reported their entire convoy as dead to the CDC, who answered Georgia’s call for help with blood tests and tranquilizers. Shaun was the first to wake in CDC isolation and hear the cool story about how they were all dead, and he spent the time waiting for George to join the land of the living by annoying CDC staff and mouthing off at every opportunity to mask his worry. Once again, the senator tried to get them to back down, but they were in far too deep now.
After bullying George into getting some rest, the two of them, along with Rick, got back to work. Using Buffy’s passwords, and the bugs she had placed all over the campaign, they heard Governor Tate implicate himself in their attacks. The conspiracy was bigger than they had expected, and had the potential to splash out onto everyone who was associated with After the End Times, so they did the only think they could think of. They fired their entire staff, and hired back only those who were willing to take on the risk of being a part of their team. And then they did what they’d been doing all along: they got back to work on the story that would very likely cost them their lives.
The break finally came when they stopped to campaign in Sacramento. They followed the money and found evidence that damned Tate, and potentially implicated the CDC as well--not very comforting when you considered how much sway the CDC held. They approached Senator Ryman with the information. He wasn’t pleased. Not by their distraction over the past several weeks, and not by the implication that his running mate was involved in the terrorist act that had claimed his daughter. He threw them out.
And then things exploded. The trailers they and Rick had been staying in blew up, and as they were running to their van for safety, George was hit by a syringe containing live-state Kellis-Amberlee. It was the end of Shaun’s world. Maybe it was stupid for a guy to admit that his sister was his whole world, but it was the truth. He was never supposed to outlive George; never supposed to have to be the one who put a bullet in her to keep her from rising, but that was exactly what happened. They managed to slow the infection for long enough for her to post one last blog entry with all of their findings, and then Shaun shot her before she could undergo conversion.
And then he went out to have a word with the man who killed her. The attack that had taken out their trailers had been the beginning of an outbreak at the convention center, but Shaun wasn’t going to let a little thing like a zombie horde keep him from settling with Tate. He’d made enough friends in Ryman’s security staff, that what should have been an impassable quarantine barrier proved only moderately challenging. Tate did the supervillain “this is my master plan, look how smart I am” before eventually taking himself out of the equation, but Shaun didn’t buy it. George was the best, and Tate just wasn’t smart enough to be behind things. There was more to the conspiracy, and he was going to find it, if it was the last thing he did. Which it probably would be.
Grief was not kind to Shaun. After the events of Sacramento, Shaun lost most of his taste for going out into the field, and he took a backseat as administrator at After the End Times. Apparently putting a bullet in your sister makes you a lot less interested in poking at dead things. Who knew. Now, while still nominally in charge of the site, he devoted most of his time to finding George’s killers. And he did it with George’s voice in his head. It wasn’t healthy, and he knew it, but if it meant that he didn’t have to live his life without her, he’d take it. What was life without a little functional insanity anyway? Good thing he fired his psychiatrist.
Abilities/Special Powers: Shaun, like everyone else in his world, is infected with the dormant state of the Kellis-Amberlee virus. Unlike most people in his world, however, he is immune to conversion. Zombie bites and other exposure to live-state Kellis-Amberlee will not cause him to become a zombie, the way they would most of the rest of his world. Otherwise? He’s just a normal twenty-something guy, in the kind of shape that allows him to lead a fairly active--some (George) might even say hyper active--life.
Third-Person Sample:
There was light on the other side of Shaun’s eyelids, and he groaned quietly to himself. He was pretty sure that when he’d fallen asleep on the roof it had been dark, and not for very long. How the hell had he managed to sleep through to full daylight?
“George, why didn’t you wake me up? You know--sometime before dawn?”
You needed the rest. Open your eyes, Shaun. I don’t think we’re in Oakland anymore.
He grunted and did as he was told. Just because George was a disembodied voice in his head now didn’t mean she had stopped being right. He blinked in surprise. “What the fuck?” He wasn’t sure which of his team had decided that their ratings required him to wander unarmed through a hedge maze, but he was pretty sure he had some asses to kick when he found out. There were no obvious cameras, but he’d known Buffy for too long to believe that the only cameras around were the ones you actually saw.
God, he missed her. Not as much as George, but he did. When he wasn’t furious with her for how things had turned out, that was. He was never supposed to be the last man standing.
I’m sorry. I miss her too.
“I know you do.” He pushed to his feet and looked around. He didn’t hear anything, which he hoped was a good sign, and not a sign of an ambush waiting to happen. No obvious weapons lying around, but he wasn’t going to let that stop him from looking. If his team had dropped him here, they didn’t intend for him to run around unarmed for long. And if it had been someone else…
Well, there were only so many guesses as to who would kidnap him and leave him somewhere to get eaten, and he wasn’t giving them the satisfaction. He still had a score to settle. He started walking.
“Hey, didn’t I read somewhere that if you always turn left in a maze, you eventually get out?”
First-Person Sample:
[It’s a video post, and Shaun looks honestly amused, leaning back against a bench just outside the hedge maze.]
So, Wonderland, huh? [He laughs.] Now, it’s definitely possible that I’ve completely shuffled off all trappings of sanity, but I kinda figured my “over the rainbow” would have a lot more of my dead friends, and a lot less mad tea parties, so I guess I’ll go with it for now.
[He pauses briefly, like he’s listening to something, then snorts quietly.]
Yeah. Like a vacation. Maybe I have been under a little stress lately.
Anyway, hi. I’m Shaun Mason, from After the End Times. Anyone out there heard of us? Or better yet, anyone out there know how I can find a way to get a message out to my team that I’m alive? I’d rather avoid letting them think I did something drastic until I actually do.
DW username:
nutterzoiE-Mail: nutterzoi@hotmail.com
IM: W1ndrBoy003
Plurk:
Other Characters: N/A
Character Name: Shaun Mason
Series: Newsflesh
Timeline: Shortly after the beginning of Deadline, before the Oakland outbreak.
Canon Resource Link: No wiki, alas. Series on author’s website
Character History: The end of the world came and went in the summer of 2014, when the cure for cancer met the cure for the common cold, and spawned a zombie uprising. The dead rose, attacked the living, and at least forty percent of the world’s population was killed. The survivors moved on, and learned to cope with the Kellis-Amberlee virus that now infected the whole world, and the zombies that rose when people died and the virus activated. The world changed.
And all that happened before Shaun was even born. Rude, right?
Shaun was one of the orphans of the uprising, adopted as an infant as one half of a boy/girl set by a journalist couple, who were trying to create the Perfect Family™ after the death of their son Philip in a zombie dog attack. The Masons were pioneer bloggers in the new age of journalism, and they used their family ruthlessly to keep their ratings up. Shaun caught onto this much more quickly than Georgia--one of the few times in their lives that he was quicker on the uptake than she was. They weren’t a family. They were a business.
Despite the lack of parental warmth, there were definite benefits to the arrangement. The Masons were adamant about raising Shaun and Georgia the way they wanted to--which meant as much freedom and fresh air as possible, in a world circumscribed by blood tests and hazard zones. They wanted them to be unafraid of the outside world the way most of the population was. They succeeded. And when Georgia decided she was going to become a blogger, well. Shaun wasn’t going to be left behind. They’d always been inseparable, and that wasn’t going to change. George became a “newsie” (just the facts, ma’am), while Shaun became an “Irwin,” meaning he found dead things to poke with sticks for the amusement of the public at large.
The most important thing they got from their parents, though, was each other. They had been inseparable from the moment they were adopted, sharing a room until they were teenagers, and then sleeping in adjoining rooms afterward. As far as Shaun was concerned, Georgia was the only family he wanted or needed, and he didn’t feel the need to explain that to anyone who might think it was weird that his sister was still his best friend. Nor did he feel the need to explain the physical aspect of their relationship to anyone (not that it was an issue. They kept things quiet to avoid scandal and disownment). Still, as far as Shaun was concerned, it was their life, and they had the blood tests to prove they weren’t biologically related, so the rest of the world could go to hell. Georgia was the only person he loved in any meaningful way, and he would follow her to the end of the world.
Then they got the biggest break of their young blogging careers. They were selected, along with their friend and colleague (and technical and espionage expert) Buffy, to be the blogging team for presidential hopeful Senator Ryman. And just like that, they had their own domain, their own market share, and they were on the campaign trail. It was sink or swim--no going back now.
For a while things went smoothly. The senator was almost too good to be true--a man of honesty and principles, which George appreciated, and the security team was friendly and not averse to letting journalists look under rocks for dead things, which Shaun appreciated. Senator Ryman’s popularity continued to grow, along with that of the newly minted “After the End Times.”
Then came Eakly, Oklahoma.
An outbreak of zombies attacked the camp they’d set up for the night after one of Senator Ryman’s speeches. Shaun and George helped to put down the outbreak (catching it all on film, of course), but not everyone survived. They lost staffers and security alike. It wasn’t until later that they discovered that the attack had been the result of deliberate sabotage. Some of the alarms had been cut, and some of the security guards had been shot. They never had a chance, and Shaun would have nightmares about it for weeks.
Still, the show (and the campaign) must go on, and they weren’t going to let a little thing like a failed assassination attempt slow them down. In fact, the footage from the attack actually made their ratings go up. Everyone loves a little drama with their news. Similarly, Senator Ryman’s popularity continued to increase, making him one of the top contenders for the party nomination as the RNC approached.
At which point tragedy struck again. Ryman took the nomination, over second place candidate Governor Tate (the dangerously fundamentalist candidate from Texas), while an outbreak was happening on his horse ranch back home. His wife’s parents, several stablehands, and his oldest daughter lost their lives while he was accepting his party’s nomination.
While most people wrote off the incident as a tragic accident, George thought there was something more there. She and Shaun went to investigate the site, bringing along Rick, one of their newer hires, to help out, and stepped on the answer. Literally. While Shaun was pulling broken pieces of syringe out of the bottom of his boot, they discovered another intact syringe, filled with live-state virus. It wasn’t an accident. Someone had deliberately infected one of the horses with active Kellis-Amberlee virus in order to set off an outbreak. It was murder.
After a slightly harrowing encounter with the military while they tried to leave the site, in which Shaun was belligerent toward the men with the big guns who were threatening his sister, they returned to their hotel. There, Ryman and his new running mate, Governor Tate, tried to convince them to stop following the campaign and go home. It was too dangerous. People were dying. Shaun and Georgia disagreed (Shaun somewhat more loudly and with more profanity, but he’s never minded looking unprofessional so that George can look better by comparison). They had signed on to follow the entire campaign, and they were going to follow it to the end, no matter what. While Buffy wanted to take the out they were being offered, she was overruled. They continued, hurtling toward the next tragedy.
It struck when the finally hit the road again, and this time, it was far more personal. They were attacked on the road to Texas, and Buffy was bitten, giving her plenty of time to deliver some devastating news. She had turned traitor. She’d been feeding information about the campaign to someone who wanted to do them harm. She’d thought she was doing the right thing to save the world, until the incident at the Ryman ranch, at which point she’d realized that her actions were getting people killed, and stopped the flow of information. Which of course, only made her a liability that had needed to be disposed of. She gave them her passwords before she finished converting, and Georgia fired the shot that kept her from rising again.
And the hits kept on coming. It turned out that someone had reported their entire convoy as dead to the CDC, who answered Georgia’s call for help with blood tests and tranquilizers. Shaun was the first to wake in CDC isolation and hear the cool story about how they were all dead, and he spent the time waiting for George to join the land of the living by annoying CDC staff and mouthing off at every opportunity to mask his worry. Once again, the senator tried to get them to back down, but they were in far too deep now.
After bullying George into getting some rest, the two of them, along with Rick, got back to work. Using Buffy’s passwords, and the bugs she had placed all over the campaign, they heard Governor Tate implicate himself in their attacks. The conspiracy was bigger than they had expected, and had the potential to splash out onto everyone who was associated with After the End Times, so they did the only think they could think of. They fired their entire staff, and hired back only those who were willing to take on the risk of being a part of their team. And then they did what they’d been doing all along: they got back to work on the story that would very likely cost them their lives.
The break finally came when they stopped to campaign in Sacramento. They followed the money and found evidence that damned Tate, and potentially implicated the CDC as well--not very comforting when you considered how much sway the CDC held. They approached Senator Ryman with the information. He wasn’t pleased. Not by their distraction over the past several weeks, and not by the implication that his running mate was involved in the terrorist act that had claimed his daughter. He threw them out.
And then things exploded. The trailers they and Rick had been staying in blew up, and as they were running to their van for safety, George was hit by a syringe containing live-state Kellis-Amberlee. It was the end of Shaun’s world. Maybe it was stupid for a guy to admit that his sister was his whole world, but it was the truth. He was never supposed to outlive George; never supposed to have to be the one who put a bullet in her to keep her from rising, but that was exactly what happened. They managed to slow the infection for long enough for her to post one last blog entry with all of their findings, and then Shaun shot her before she could undergo conversion.
And then he went out to have a word with the man who killed her. The attack that had taken out their trailers had been the beginning of an outbreak at the convention center, but Shaun wasn’t going to let a little thing like a zombie horde keep him from settling with Tate. He’d made enough friends in Ryman’s security staff, that what should have been an impassable quarantine barrier proved only moderately challenging. Tate did the supervillain “this is my master plan, look how smart I am” before eventually taking himself out of the equation, but Shaun didn’t buy it. George was the best, and Tate just wasn’t smart enough to be behind things. There was more to the conspiracy, and he was going to find it, if it was the last thing he did. Which it probably would be.
Grief was not kind to Shaun. After the events of Sacramento, Shaun lost most of his taste for going out into the field, and he took a backseat as administrator at After the End Times. Apparently putting a bullet in your sister makes you a lot less interested in poking at dead things. Who knew. Now, while still nominally in charge of the site, he devoted most of his time to finding George’s killers. And he did it with George’s voice in his head. It wasn’t healthy, and he knew it, but if it meant that he didn’t have to live his life without her, he’d take it. What was life without a little functional insanity anyway? Good thing he fired his psychiatrist.
Abilities/Special Powers: Shaun, like everyone else in his world, is infected with the dormant state of the Kellis-Amberlee virus. Unlike most people in his world, however, he is immune to conversion. Zombie bites and other exposure to live-state Kellis-Amberlee will not cause him to become a zombie, the way they would most of the rest of his world. Otherwise? He’s just a normal twenty-something guy, in the kind of shape that allows him to lead a fairly active--some (George) might even say hyper active--life.
Third-Person Sample:
There was light on the other side of Shaun’s eyelids, and he groaned quietly to himself. He was pretty sure that when he’d fallen asleep on the roof it had been dark, and not for very long. How the hell had he managed to sleep through to full daylight?
“George, why didn’t you wake me up? You know--sometime before dawn?”
You needed the rest. Open your eyes, Shaun. I don’t think we’re in Oakland anymore.
He grunted and did as he was told. Just because George was a disembodied voice in his head now didn’t mean she had stopped being right. He blinked in surprise. “What the fuck?” He wasn’t sure which of his team had decided that their ratings required him to wander unarmed through a hedge maze, but he was pretty sure he had some asses to kick when he found out. There were no obvious cameras, but he’d known Buffy for too long to believe that the only cameras around were the ones you actually saw.
God, he missed her. Not as much as George, but he did. When he wasn’t furious with her for how things had turned out, that was. He was never supposed to be the last man standing.
I’m sorry. I miss her too.
“I know you do.” He pushed to his feet and looked around. He didn’t hear anything, which he hoped was a good sign, and not a sign of an ambush waiting to happen. No obvious weapons lying around, but he wasn’t going to let that stop him from looking. If his team had dropped him here, they didn’t intend for him to run around unarmed for long. And if it had been someone else…
Well, there were only so many guesses as to who would kidnap him and leave him somewhere to get eaten, and he wasn’t giving them the satisfaction. He still had a score to settle. He started walking.
“Hey, didn’t I read somewhere that if you always turn left in a maze, you eventually get out?”
First-Person Sample:
[It’s a video post, and Shaun looks honestly amused, leaning back against a bench just outside the hedge maze.]
So, Wonderland, huh? [He laughs.] Now, it’s definitely possible that I’ve completely shuffled off all trappings of sanity, but I kinda figured my “over the rainbow” would have a lot more of my dead friends, and a lot less mad tea parties, so I guess I’ll go with it for now.
[He pauses briefly, like he’s listening to something, then snorts quietly.]
Yeah. Like a vacation. Maybe I have been under a little stress lately.
Anyway, hi. I’m Shaun Mason, from After the End Times. Anyone out there heard of us? Or better yet, anyone out there know how I can find a way to get a message out to my team that I’m alive? I’d rather avoid letting them think I did something drastic until I actually do.